Start Your Business Right with Low-Cost Research

Put the coffee on and learn the fast track way to research your market for long-term business success
Just imagine that you're planning to open a coffee shop in Seattle. If there's one thing the city has, besides rain, it's a lot of places serving up caffeine. Which means the competition could kill you, unless you find a great location and the best way to serve up your brew. Understanding everything you can about coffee consumption will help make your business a success. For example, you'll need to know who drinks coffee, favorite haunts and beverages, types of competition, available locations, do they drive or walk, etc.

When looking for information about your industry, starting with Google might seem like a good idea, but in our example, "coffee shops" turned up over two million hits. Trying "coffee shop customers" narrowed it down to a little over two thousand -- still a lot of data to wade through.

A better way to start searching is through related trade publications and organizations. They're already focused on your industry, and usually offer low and no cost information you can download. Here's how to get started:

  1. It's easy to get lost and distracted in cyberspace. Make a list of what you're looking for, like sales figures, trends, pricing, competition, etc. Think about customer characteristics too, like demographics, psychographics, behaviors and geography.

  2. Create a list of phrases common to your industry, such as "coffee retail", "coffee shop customers", "coffee drinkers", "Seattle coffee shops", etc.

  3. Compile your list of publications and organizations by going to: World-newspapers that lists magazines as well as newspapers. You can also try FindArticles "Coffee shop customers" resulted in a long list of articles with author and publisher. Lastly, try "coffee trade publications" in a search engine. This turned up Tea & Coffee Asia, Gourmet Retailer and several trade organizations. Here's our list If you're looking within a particular geography, remember to include local magazines, newspapers, radio and television stations (for example, Seattle Magazine, The Seattle Times, KIRO, and NWCN).

  4. At the sites, look for reports, white papers, news, articles and statistics. At the media sites, look under Advertising or Media Kits too, which typically offer information about their audience that you can use in your own research. To save time sifting through unrelated information, prioritize the websites most targeted to your market.

No matter what product or service you plan to offer, the marketing of that product must be based on a good understanding of the industry, your customer and the competition -- and the Internet is a good place to start if you know how to look.
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